This past week, my professor asked us to try writing a vignette (a short anecdote that pulls from different observations made at the site of study) about our research from a perspective other than our own, as a way of possibly introducing our reader to different parts of our study (research design, methods, literature review, etc.) or creating a narrative from disparate observations, interviews, or notes. I'm not sure how I feel about it, and mine is more of a single anecdote than a vignette pulling from several ones, but it's a story I want to tell regardless.

It's a warm, late summer day, and the rain clouds that roll off the water and onto the Brooklyn, seaside campus are not unlike those that Mina and Lucy watch before The Demeter runs aground, bringing Dracula to England. The teacher mentions this to his class, hoping to give them a sense of relation to the events of the novel they're reading. There's some chittering from the students at this, but clearly they find it as cheesy as assigning a horror novel to coincide with Halloween.

"Okay, let's jump into it then," he declares sitting on the front edge of his desk, book in hand, waiting for the first person to speak-up. "Did we find anything peculiar in these chapters?" he prods. "Does Dracula fit the image of a vampire as we think of it?" The bait is set. Then a sarcastic young woman, who enjoys making snide remarks, raises her hand. He nods to her.

"So what's the deal with Dracula? Is he gay for Jonathan or what?" The teacher smiles, and the class titters at the suggestion.

But they look surprised when he responds, seriously, "Well, let's talk about that. What makes you ask?"

"The way he's all possessive of him! He's always touchin' him and stuff. It's creepy."

"He's a vampire!" another student interjects. "He's supposed to be creepy! He just wants to eat the guy, right?"

"Can't it be both?" the teacher asks. And then, twenty college students were having a discussion of homosexuality as a horror element in the novel, the class using their pop culture understanding of sex and vampires to read subtext in Victorian literature.

The first college literature course I ever taught was a sophomore level Intro. to Pop Culture class. It was tied to the program I helped coordinate, which was the only reason I, only an instructor with a MA, was even allowed to teach a lit. course in a department full of qualified, tenured professors.

The caveat was that the course was carefully vetted before I taught it (using this professor's syllabus, that Universal Baseball Association.

UBA is about a man who invents an elaborate pen & paper baseball game—think Dungeons & Dragons with baseball. A loaner in love with his game and its characters, the novel begins with a series a dice rolls that end with the death of his favorite pitcher. Devastated, this is the catalyst for the novel's central conflict (separating between the real world and his imagined one). And having been written in the 1960's, my students had no idea what to make of it.

"This guy needs to get a life."

"He's whining about some made-up character?"

"Is the whole book like this?" were some early responses. Struggling to engage them with the character (and therefor, the whole novel and 3 weeks of the course), I asked, near desperation, "Can't we relate to the character on any level?!"

Then a Vietnamese student who I'm convinced learned English by watching American sitcoms, spoke up.

"Oh man, Mr. V. This reminds me of how I felt when Aeris died in Final Fantasy VII. I cried. It was legen-wait-for-it-dary!" (He ended many of class comments this way.) I pounced on it, quickly explaining to the class that this video game death is widely considered one of the most emotional in video game history, in which a central character, into whom a player could have poured dozens of hours, dies. Permanently. This does not happen in video games. When it happened to me, almost 15 years ago, I cried, too.

"Oh!" a softball player jumped in. "When I was younger, my favorite game was Pokémon." At this, several students comment, chuckle, and otherwise assert collective nostalgia. "I had this one team of Pokémon that I just kept playing with, even after I beat the game. Then one day, my little sister stole my Game Boy, started a new game, and saved over my file, deleting my Pokémon." There were several groans among her peers. "They were gone. And I didn't pick it up again."

And just like that, 20 teenagers connected to a 1960's fictional character dealing with the death of another character of his own creation for a baseball game played with pen, paper, and a handful of six-sided dice.It was then I realized I couldn't just bring pop culture into the classroom and expect it to engage students; I had to ask them to bring their own. This was the start of what would become my current research.

I also went home that afternoon and pulled out my old copy Pokémon.Questions? Quibbles? Controversies?

Regal4.1 is running a Literature Tournament to determine the favorite book of our community. As an English teacher, how could I not approve and take part. But narrowing my nominees to 15 entries was grueling. I had to end up creating my own list of meta-rules--the primary ones being conditions like series counting as a single entry and no comics allowed. And as much as I didn't like either of those, I'd have been lost without them. I admit it. I have a reading problem.

My additional rules ending up being that I had to narrow it down to only fiction, could not include series I had not yet finished reading (which is why you see no Song of Fire and Ice on here), and I had to pick novels that had something to do something with my education. This last one, I admit, had more to do with making me feel less guilty over the amount of time I spent on this list. But at the same time, I've been a student long enough that most of my favorite books were either introduced to me in school or had some bearing on who I am now as a teacher and writer. Plus, this kind of self-reflection seems more and more important to me as I delve deeper into my doctoral studies. So here's the list (in a somewhat arbitrary order), with some short explanations.

1) The Wars by Timothy FindleyThe most emotional response I've ever received from a book came from Findley's novel about a Canadian soldier in World War I. The writing is excellent, and the story is (without giving anything away) bittersweet. I cried at the end--hard--and immediately sought my mother out for a hug. This book is one (of many on this list) suggested to me by my 10th and 11th grade English teacher Mr. Hoefle. The book is deceptively short; so much so that for weeks afterward I kept it in my back pocket to continue leafing through. In that, it was the first novel I read more than once, teaching me the importance of that practice--noticing things I'd missed, appreciating the way different bits were written, etc.

2) King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider HaggardThis is seriously the most underrated novel of all time. Written in 1885, its influence has spread into the pop culture of every generation since. It's a textbook example of the popular Adventure Story for Boys of its day. It would also prove to be one of Tolkien's influences--if you want to see what The Hobbit would look like set in Africa, check this book out. And of course, Indiana Jones through Nathan Drake pull from Alan Quatermain's example. It's for this reason that not only is this my most read but taught novel.

3) The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthyAnother entry to chalk up to Mr. Hoefle, who suggested the series' second installation to me for his Advanced English summer reading. I read it almost in its entirety on a camping trip around a fire pit. While Billy Parham trekked the mountains of Mexico, I hiked the ones in New York. And while I might be tempted to attribute that to the reason I liked the book, when he assigned the novel's prequel All the Pretty Horses later that year, I realized I'd found a new favorite author. And as an aspiring writer, McCarthy's style become something to emulate.

4) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James JoyceSome high school boys turn towards Holden Caulfield for validation. Those of us whose testicles have descended relate to Stephen Dedalus.I kid. The Catcher in the Rye is a perfectly adequate novel. But despite their obvious similarities, I simply not only related better to Joyce' character, but enjoyed reading his work more. It introduced me to stream of consciousness that was publishable, which again, influenced me as a writer. But Joyce also wrote about education in a way I really appreciated--respectfully but with a critical eye.

5) The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman AlexieI read this with my little brother, in that we shared the same copy and took turns in between also sharing my PS3. He spends about every other summer with my wife and I, and while he has his own summer reading (which as a college English teacher I snub my nose at with heightened self-worth), I try to get him to read stuff he won't get at his Catholic high school in the Bible belt. That includes books that have been banned, like this one. As a long time fan of the Wimpy Kid books, I saw Alexie's work as a "better" version of that. Wimpy Kid is essentially an illustrated novel about a kid whining about his dad making him go outside to play; Part-Time Indian is about a kid who occasionally has to walk/hitch hike 22 miles to school when his dad can't afford gas. I was pleased to find that he really liked it when he handed it to me as he wiped tears out of his eyes one afternoon.

6) The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien

When this was assigned to me in the 6th grade, I'd neither heard of it, The Lord of the Rings, or JRR Tolkien. I managed to scrounge up an ancient copy from a used bookstore with a cover illustrated by the author. It showed a fire-breathing dragon being struck by an arrow over a small town. What?! I dove into it. I'd always liked fairy tales and the like, but simply put, I had no idea that books like this existed. And while I had grown up loving reading, this book began my love of literature.

7) One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia MarquezMr. Hoefle strikes again. He and Marquez taught me about magic realism. And that books could have sex in them. And that a room of teenage boys could talk seriously about such things without laughing. But also, peach jam makes a hilarious gift for a teacher at the end of the school year.

8) Zorro by Isabel AllendeWhile most of these entries celebrate learning something, Isabel Allende's take on the origin of Zorro is, for me, an example of it never being over. My Master's thesis was a creative piece trying to demonstrate what the superhero mythos could look like as a literary hero. Zorro, published before I began writing said thesis, demonstrates what the superhero mythos looks like as a literary hero. I didn't know that this book existed until after I'd graduated, and I was pretty frustrated when I found it, primarily because it kind of made what I wrote look silly by comparison but mostly because it pretty much proved what I was trying argue.

9) The House on Mango Street by Sandra CisnerosI discovered Cisneros' work on my own, in college. Nowadays, it's pretty common reading for middle and high school students in predominantly Latino communities. As a Mexican-American who went to high school in Quebec and university in Tennessee, I didn't encounter it. It was incredibly affirming. I'd never read a work by a Chicano author or even thought to look for one. I'd never read about families like mine. Even if I hadn't grown up like Esperanza, my parents had, and I knew their stories. And here they were, in print.

10) The Universal Baseball Association by Robert CooverWith only an MA, I didn't get a lot of pull for class choice when I taught full-time. So when I was offered the chance to teach a sophomore level literature class, I was more than willing to include this book at the suggestion of my chair. I'm glad I did. It's the story of a man who obsessively creates and plays a pen and paper baseball game in the 60s. It's fantastic, and it may be the first novel to really dive into what it means to be a "gamer." To top it off, teaching it was brilliant. Even "cool kids" related it to playing Pokemon in their past, and it may be the most I've had students relate to a character.

11) The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis StevensonDespite my love of comics, I chose to teach my first no-strings-attached literature class about 19th century British literature. I knew King Solomon's Mines was a winner, but I was really worried about teaching this one for how much it's permeated our culture but been changed along the way. I feared my students wouldn't like its classic elements, that it would be too slow or not scary enough. When one morning, half-way through the story, one of my students came into class and said she'd had a nightmare about running away from Mr. Hyde down a dark, foggy, gas-lit Victorian London street, I realized I'd discovered something...

12) The Hunger Games by Suzanne CollinsTaking a break from books I have taught, this series was the center of the most exciting course I ever designed. Last summer, I was offered an ITV lit. class that would be streamed to my university's satellite campuses. The timing was perfect; the film had just come out and the series was at the peak of its popularity. I had the idea to teach it along with other books like it (Battle Royale, The Most Dangerous Game, among some short stories) to discuss what the genre said about the cultures that produced and made them popular. And obviously, since the students from the different campuses would only see each other on TV, it made perfect since to pit them against each other for the best grades!And then the class was cancelled due to low enrollment...

13) Dracula by Bram Stoker

...So back to teaching Victorian literature, have I mentioned I love it? Have I mentioned students do, too? It's the weirdest thing. When I first had the idea, I realized it was a long shot among a generation that tends to dislike black and white movies on the basis that they're in black and white (I kid you not, a student once asked me, "If it's so great, why didn't they bother to put in color?" But that's neither here nor there.). But the book is another great example of how much we've been influenced by this generation of writers--vampires sure, but if you wanna know what Dead Space or Alien would be like on a ship sailing to England, then this is the book for you!

14) The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-ExuperyNot only is this a brilliant little book of philosophy disguised as cute cartoony characters, but it was the first book I ever read in French. This was huge! I'd just moved to Montreal a couple of years earlier, I was years behind my peers who grew up speaking the language, and my 8th grade French teacher told us we'd be reading this. Despite its size, this was immensely intimidating when I began, but unbelievably satisfying when I'd finished. It was a brilliant move on my teacher's part, since it was just deep enough for us to actually have to dig into it, but also short enough to keep us from failing. And on top of that, I actually enjoyed reading it.

15) Harry Potter by JK RowlingMutual love of this series got me my first date in high school--a learning experience in itself.

My latest comics effort is a 3-page soccer analogy for my teaching philosophy. This was our first major assignment for my Comics in Education class, so I put more effort into it than my previous sketches. In other words, I wracked my brains for how to express my teaching philosophy as a comic :-/

We've known about this assignment from the beginning of the semester, and I geared most of my previous comics towards education, hoping that a way to connect them into a cohesive statement about education would miraculously appear to me when it came time to draw. What I ended up with was a bunch of stories about teaching that only captured part of what I believe about teaching. In the end, I settled on this one when I was able to conceptualize a way to represent it as an interesting comic.
This story is mostly true. I did lead such a workshop and there was such a curmudgeon present. No, he didn't look like a clown, I didn't share my analogy with him, and he didn't walk out mid-presentation. But sadly, his attitude was all too familiar, and he now represents an entire school of thought about teaching (or really, not teaching) for me. Similarly, the comic also represents how I feel about teaching as a practice, namely that teaching is teaching. Subject matter and theories might change or differ, but the methods for conveying them really don't, in my opinion.

The title of the comic, "Practice Makes Perfect!" is not only my belief but what I ended up saying to this particular professor when trying to explain how he might need to reframe his writing assignments for student success.

As always, I'm open to feedback--both to my comic and ideas about teaching!

This week's comics assignment was to tell the story of "How I Got Here" in 2 pages and then again in 3 panels. We were allowed to interpret the theme however we wanted. I started working on this comic around the time I finished rereading Hunger of Memory by Richard Rodriguez. Putting aside the identity-questioning that book always causes me, it had me thinking about my own education, and I decided to take that perspective to this assignment.

I tried to not only show my progression as a student but also the teaching styles of my different schools (represented by the flags, cross, and pennants). But maybe I shouldn't over-explain.

For the 3-panel version, I literally cut and pasted the 3 panels that I felt most closely told the same story.
The quality of this one wasn't as good, but I thought it accurately portrayed one of the main reasons I decided to study education: going from interest and good grades in English at my Canadian elementary school to no interest or effort but good grades in English at my American high school. As the teacher dialogue suggests, I think a big part of that was the difference in student participation (which wasn't exactly encouraged/tolerated in my US school).